Great review. I will be signing up soon, definitely. I promised my wife I would take a break after the OSCP. Of course I did the FC4 already just to see if I could do it. Thanks for the review. You and MaXe had a great experience even with the pain. LOL. I have to take this course. I am really excited now. Will it matter if someone uses BackTrack 5 instead of BackTrack 4 when taking the course??

I took the CPT course too and I have yet to challenge the OSCE exam. I have to say the course indeed opened my eyes big time!

After doing the exercises, I took a pause and wrote the CISSP exam (because every contract requires it...). I basicaly went from one extreme to another! Passing from "dreaming about Hex" to learning about "Business Continuity Planning" was like eating vanilla ice cream after drink whiskey. It didn't taste good...

I am going to Dallas in a bit more than a week to take "Advanced Penetration Testing Course" by Joe McCray. Then, after a little break, I will start playing in exploitdb to recreate exploits.

After I completed the course modules I jumped on exploit-db and started recreating all of the buffer overflow exploits I could find. I would take one, strip out everything in the middle and try to get the same results. I probably recreated 50 exploits. The point of this was to get very familiar inside a debugger and to see first hand some of the obstacles you encounter when writing exploits.

BTW cd1zz, would you say this tactic paid off? Would you change anything in your preparation?

I've been putting off the CISSP but unfortunately I think its next for me. Nice work on getting through that.

For me, recreating exploits was key because I only knew basic assembly and had basic debugger skills. It forced me to become comfortable in a debugger and learn much more about assembly. For example, if the original author of an exploit wrote it as an EIP overwrite, I'd look for the SEH overwrite and rewrite it. If they didn't use an egghunter, I would add an egghunter. If the original author only wrote it for XP, I'd write it for Vista or 7. Using this method I managed to run into all kinds of issues I had to sort out.

My biggest weakness going into this course was on the web side. I wish I would have spent more time on this. I would recommend not only focusing on the exploit dev but understand exploiting all kinds of web apps.

Congrats cd1zz! I know the pain of going through the CTP training and the challenge, and my time has come to suffer it again. Hopefully I'll be able to get my life back once I knock it off, unless I get hooked on with a new course.

KillJ0y wrote:Great review. I will be signing up soon, definitely. I promised my wife I would take a break after the OSCP. Of course I did the FC4 already just to see if I could do it. Thanks for the review. You and MaXe had a great experience even with the pain. LOL. I have to take this course. I am really excited now. Will it matter if someone uses BackTrack 5 instead of BackTrack 4 when taking the course??

It was fun, but all the glamour has almost worn off for me now lol It won't matter which version of BackTrack you use, but different versions of Metasploit has different payloads, so you may want to grab an older version of Metasploit as well just in case if it doesn't work out. (There's more info on the student forums about this as well.)

There's a few other tools that requires different args as well, and some that works a little bit differently but this is just a part of the challenge in my opinion, so it shouldn't matter a lot since I didn't use BackTrack